January 13, 2022 27ington Post that strongly appeared to
endorse race- centered interpretations
of the Revolution’s supposed proslav-
ery origins. According to the op-ed, a
November 1775 proclamation by the
royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dun-
more, that offered freedom to slaves
who would join him and take up arms
against their patriot masters was a cru-
cial turning point in the run-up to the
Revolution. Dunmore’s proclamation,
according to Holton, aroused hysteria
about what he called an Anglo-African
alliance that finally convinced white
Americans to separate. The Revolution
was thus in fundamental ways a racist,
proslavery “secession from Britain.”^5
Liberty Is Sweet presents a more
measured view of slavery and the Revo-
lution. In the book, for example, Holton
takes pains to dismiss the race-centered
assertion that fears of growing abo-
litionist political influence in Britain
helped convince American slavehold-
ers to favor independence in 1776.^6 The
book also makes clear, as the op-ed did
not, that Holton thinks Dunmore’s pol-
icy mainly disturbed white Virginians,
not white Americans in general. Yet the
book does insist that it was a fateful ep-
isode, and that “no other document...
did more than Dunmore’s proclamation
to convert white residents of Britain’s
most populous American colony to the
cause of independence.”
Even this carefully framed assertion,
however, is highly misleading. Well be-
fore Dunmore announced his policy,
royal authority had almost completely
collapsed in Virginia, where Loyalists
were relatively scarce. Having fled Wil-
liamsburg, the colony’s capital, in June,
Dunmore holed up with a token force
on a man-of-war offshore. In desper-
ation, acting on his own initiative and
with no intention of organizing a slave
insurrection, he took what he called
“this most disagreeable, but now ab-
solutely necessary step”—expanding
upon a military tactic that British en-
slavers had found essential for decades
in the Caribbean: arming slaves to do
their bidding, in this case in exchange
for a promise of freedom.^7
Besides augmenting his tiny army,
Dunmore hoped to turn the tide by ter-
rorizing the patriots, whose investment
in slavery and fear of slave rebellion
would presumably outweigh their com-
plaints against the British Empire. Up
to a point, he succeeded. Unsettling re-
ports that slaves were preparing to take
up arms and fight alongside the British
had been circulating in Virginia andelsewhere for at least a year; Dunmore
himself had fed those fears months
earlier by briefly threatening to turn
the enslaved against their masters. His
proclamation in November unleashed a
torrent of anger and dread. “Tide water
Virginia took alarm,” the historian
Benjamin Quarles observed in his stan-
dard account, “as rumors spread that
slaves were stampeding to the British.”^8
Washington, having assumed command
of the Continental Army in Cambridge
five months earlier, projected that, were
Dunmore not crushed, his strength was
bound to increase “as a Snow ball by
Rolling; and faster.”
But Dunmore’s despairing strategy
backfired. “The stampede [of slaves], if
it occurred, did not go very far,” Quarles
concluded. Above all, Dunmore’s gam-
bit, instead of breaking the patriots’
will, only reinforced their allegiance to
the independence cause, based on their
conviction, built up for a decade, that
British authorities would use any tactic
to enforce their iron rule. Dunmore did
organize and outfit what he called his
Ethiopian Regiment, consisting of some
three hundred black men, then led them,
after an initial victorious skirmish, to a
disastrous defeat in the Battle of Great
Bridge in December 1775. Barely a
month after releasing his proclamation,
having failed to staunch the patriot tide,
Dunmore retreated to his ship and never
again gained a foothold on the Virginia
mainland. He eventually sailed to New
York with about five hundred newly
freed blacks but abandoned one thou-
sand others to die on Gwynn’s Island,
stricken by a smallpox outbreak after he
neglected to inoculate them.
It would take a few more months for
the American patriot leaders, North
and South, after more than a year of
revolutionary mobilization, combat,
and self-government—and squabbling
among themselves—to finally agree that
the time was ripe to declare formally the
united colonies’ independence. They
duly included in their long list of griev-
ances against the Crown the inciting of
slave insurrections, an outrage that the
antislavery patriot Thomas Paine de-
nounced, weeks after the Dunmore
incident, as a cynical military tactic un-
dertaken by “a barbarous and hellish
power” that dealt “brutally” with the
colonists and “treacherously” with the
blacks.^9 Some of the relatively small
number of prominent Virginia Loyalists,
including the planter William Byrd III,
did switch sides after November 1775,
and some cautious patriots may have be-come more determined, but they hardly
represented a mass of white Virginians.
None of this validates viewing the Dun-
more incident as a major turning point in
the drive to independence.
Nevertheless, Holton has recently
made an aggressive public show of evi-
dence about contacts and rumored con-
tacts between enslaved blacks and the
British, and about how Dunmore’s proc-
lamation infuriated and unified white
Virginians.^10 There were certainly, as
Quarles demonstrated decades ago, un-
told numbers of restive slaves ready and
eager to flee to and fight for anyone who
would offer them freedom, and tens of
thousands of them would escape to Brit-
ish lines during the Revolutionary War.
But historians have known about all of
this for a very long time, and Holton’s
blitz of documents is mostly noisy ob-
fuscation. What Liberty Is Sweet fails
to offer is a single piece of evidence—a
letter or diary entry or newspaper arti-
cle or pamphlet—in which any patriot
states that Dunmore’s proclamation
converted him or anyone else to support
independence.^11 Without that evidence,
Holton’s argument collapses.The coverage of slavery and the Rev-
olution elsewhere in Liberty Is Sweet is
similarly skewed and questionable. The
book is especially weak on the Revolu-
tion’s antislavery impulses. Holton does
allow that its ideals could take on anti-
slavery meanings, to the point of help-
ing to inspire the revolution in Haiti
in 1791. He includes a few paragraphs
noting the passage of Pennsylvania’s
unprecedented gradual emancipation
law in 1780 and the freedom suits and
petitions by enslaved men and women
that led to the abolition of slavery in
Massachusetts three years later. Other-
wise, though, he says virtually nothing
about the pioneering American anti-
slavery politics that grew alongside the
revolutionary movement outside the
lower South—the most advanced and
effective antislavery upsurge of its kind
in the Atlantic world before 1787.
Elsewhere, Holton goes overboard in
his indictments. Historians have lately
been arguing over how much the Con-
stitution enshrined slavery, and he un-
surprisingly sides with those who call
its framing and ratification a complete
proslavery victory. The Constitution, he
writes, “facilitated a postwar boom in
the forced transportation of Africans to
the Americas: nearly a million souls be-
tween 1783 and 1792.” In fact, the Consti-
tution’s facilitation of the Atlantic slave
trade amounted to authorizing Congressto abolish US involvement in 1808, a step
that all but two of the states, North Car-
olina and Georgia, had already taken on
their own before the framers assembled
in Philadelphia. It did permit US ships to
carry slaves to the rest of the Americas
before 1808—about 2.4 percent of the
total for the decade beginning in 1783—
but it neither facilitated nor protected
anything at all before its ratification in
1788, halfway into the period Holton
specifies. (Between 1786 and 1795, years
more in line with the Constitution’s
framing, an estimated 10,006 enslaved
Africans disembarked in what had
been British mainland North America,
which represented an enormous decline
from before the Revolution.) Tying the
Constitution to “nearly a million souls”
transported to the Americas over a sin-
gle decade after 1783 is highly deceptive.
The story of the Constitution’s conces-
sions to slavery is sobering enough with-
out exaggeration.^12
Overall, Holton is divided about the
Revolution. At one level, he writes, it
demonstrated “the desire of Ameri-
cans—of every race, rank, and gen-
der—to breathe free.” At the same time,
he thinks that the revolutionary elite
frustrated those desires among the less
privileged, making the vast majority of
Americans victims as much as victors.
“For the founding generation,” he con-
cludes, “the American Revolution pro-
duced more misery than freedom,” in
large part because that generation failed
to abolish slavery outright. Put aside,
though, the fact that the Revolution pro-
duced a society and polity that, with all
of its horrific contradictions and oppres-
sion, was more democratic and inclu-
sive—and, in the North, more actively
antislavery—than any other in the world
as of 1787. Put aside, as well, whether the
success of any of the great modern revo-
lutions ought to be judged on its imme-
diate effects or on what it helped achieve
(or destroy) over time. Holton’s conclu-
sion still begs a basic question, partic-
ularly concerning slavery: What might
have happened had the British won the
Revolutionary War, or had the Revolu-
tion never happened at all?
One powerful interpretation holds
that the loss of the American colonies,
as well as the rise of antislavery politics
in America, stimulated the emergence
of an authentic abolitionist movement
in Britain.^13 Equally important, it is
virtually inconceivable that had Brit-
ain, with its domination of the Atlantic
slave trade, its lucrative sugar colonies
in the Caribbean, and its cotton fac-
tories at home, retained the colonies
that became the United States—soon
to become home to the slavery-driven
cotton kingdom—it would not have(^5) “The Declaration of Independence’s
Debt to Black America,” July 2, 2021.
Several prominent historians of the
Revolutionary era severely criticized
the op-ed. See Carol Berkin et al., “On
1619 and Woody Holton’s Account of
Slavery and the Independence Move-
ment: Six Historians Respond,” Me-
dium, September 6, 2021.
(^6) Holton singles out Nikole Hannah-
Jones’s original introductory essay to
The New York Times Magazine’s 1619
Project, claiming that it “vastly ex-
aggerates the size and strength of the
British abolition movement” in the
years before the Revolution.
(^7) On arming slaves before the Revo-
lution, see Philip D. Morgan and An-
drew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming
Slaves in the American Revolution,” in
Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to
the Modern Age, edited by Christopher
Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan
(Yale University Press, 2006).
(^8) The Negro in the American Revolu-
tion (1961; University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1996), p. 23.
(^9) The British treachery became clear
with their handling of the tens of thou-
sands of slaves whom they seized from
patriot slaveholders or who ran to Brit-
ish lines during the ensuing Revolution-
ary War. Some ended up either claimed
by British officers who wanted slaves of
their own or given as compensation to
Loyalist slaveholders whose slaves had
run away. A large number were enslaved
in the Bahamas, where they increased
the black population by threefold—and
where the slaveholding Lord Dunmore
ruled as governor from 1787 to 1796.
Thousands more wound up as slaves
elsewhere in the British Caribbean,
with the largest single group consigned
to a dubious freedom in a largely hostile
Nova Scotia. See David Brion Davis, In-
human Bondage: The Rise and Fall of
Slavery in the New World (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2006), p. 151.
(^10) See Hillel Italie, “Gordon Wood and
Woody Holton Clash Over Past and
Present,” Associated Press, October
28, 2021. In line with his fervent dou-
bling down on the point, Holton has
asserted, preposterously, that “for men
like Washington, Jefferson, and Mad-
ison, the Dunmore Proclamation ig-
nited the turn to independence.” See
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,
edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones et al.
(OneWorld, 2021), p. 16.
(^11) Holton does cite a letter wr itten by the
South Carolinian Edward Rutledge,
who was then living in Philadelphia
and speculated that Dunmore’s procla-
mation would do more than any other
act to “work an eternal separation” be-
tween Britain and America. On histo-
rians’ misreadings and manipulations
of this document, see my “A Matter of
Facts,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2020.
(^12) The Constitution did permit South
Carolina to reopen its slave trade in De-
cember 1803, which led to the arrival of
an estimated 63,862 enslaved Africans
to the Carolinas and Georgia before
Congress abolished US participation
in the trade after January 1, 1808. The
total roughly equaled that for all ports
in the colonies during the fifteen-year
period prior to the outbreak of the Rev-
olution. But even this enduring shame
is very different from the figure of
“nearly a million souls” that Holton in-
vokes. Figures from the Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade Database, at slavevoyages
.org/assessment/ estimates.
(^13) Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral
Capital: Foundations of British Aboli-
tionism (University of North Carolina
Press, 2006).
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